The US has cleared roughly ten Chinese companies to buy Nvidia's H200 AI chips, including Alibaba, Tencent, Bytedance, and JD.com, Reuters reports exclusively. Lenovo and Foxconn were approved as distribution partners with export licenses. Each buyer can purchase up to 75,000 chips.
Not a single chip has shipped, though. According to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Beijing is blocking the purchases to protect its domestic chip industry and avoid US dependence. China is also tightening scrutiny of foreign technology dependencies.
The reason: China doesn't want to fall behind in the AI race, and building its own infrastructure matters just as much, or even more, as developing new models. The domestic chip industry has made progress recently, but supply shortages persist, and Chinese chips still lag their American counterparts in performance.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang traveled to Beijing with President Trump to push the deal forward. The US is reportedly demanding 25 percent of chip sales revenue, raising concerns in China about possible chip tampering, in part because the rule would require importing the chips from the US.
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